Erlendur Haraldsson (November 3, 1931 – November 22, 2020) was a professor emeritus of psychology on the faculty of social science at the University of Iceland. He published in various psychology and psychiatry journals. In addition, he published parapsychology books and authored a number of papers for parapsychology journals. Education Erlendur studied philosophy at the universities of Iceland, Edinburgh and Freiburg from 1954 to 1958 and supported himself as a writer and journalist from 1959 to 1963. He studied psychology at Freiburg and at the University of Munich, where he obtained the Dipl. Psych. in 1969. He was a research fellow at the Institute of Parapsychology in Durham, N. C. 1969–70 and did an internship in clinical psychology at the Department of Psychiatry, University of Virginia in Charlottesville, 1970–71. He received his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Freiburg under parapsychologist Hans Bender in 1972. Teaching and research career Erlendur worked as a research associate at the American Society for Psychical Research from 1972 to 1974. In 1973 he became a faculty member at the University of Iceland, where he advanced to Professor of Psychology in 1989. He retired from teaching in 1999. He has conducted surveys of religious and folk beliefs; for example in a survey of randomly selected Icelanders conducted in 1974–75 and published in 1977 and 1978, he established that an unusually high proportion believe in the paranormal, in particular in supernatural figures such as huldufólk and draugar, research built on in the 2000s by Terry Gunnell; in a 1978 survey he examined the prevalence of belief in Iceland in precognitive dreams; and in a study published in 1985 he found proportionally more reports of encounters with dead people from Iceland than any other European country. He has also contributed to the cross-cultural standardization of psychological testing instruments. In addition, in 1982–83 he worked with Ian Stevenson at the University of Virginia on reincarnation research. He spent a year with J. B. Rhine in Durham, North Carolina. He has coauthored studies of the personality, abilities and psychological characteristics of children who claim memories of a previous life in Sri Lanka, comparing them with paired children who did not claim such memories. Erlendur received the Outstanding Career Award from the Parapsychological Association and the Myers Memorial Award from the Society for Psychical Research. His 2005 book Látnir í heimi lifenda (English translation The Departed Among the Living,